Pavel & I (25 page)

Pavel slept and thought: Coppelius.

Odysseus, he thought, in the cave of a giant.

Odin, Žižka, Oedipus, holding aloft his mother's spiky brooch. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man was king.

Pavel slept and felt that there was salt upon his cheek. The salt of sweat, not blood, nor tears: his skin tingling with it, and with the heat. It was hot there, in the land of the blind. Sun setting over Thebes, dipping the world in red.

Pavel slept and thought the air was burning.

By this he knew it was but a dream.

He woke and I was there, crouching low beside the bars of his cage, a pack of cigarettes open towards Pavel. He started and rolled to his knees. Sweat on his brow, and bruises running the length of
him; one could see it in the manner that he moved. His shirt soggy on the chest and the back, and the trousers sticking to his thighs. I watched him cast around, trying to get his bearings, his breath invisible to him, in the winter of '46. For a moment he may have thought he had lost his mind, until he remembered last night's descent and the miracle of Fosko's cellar. Its heat was generated by the giant hulk of a cast-iron stove that sat snug against the back of Pavel's cage; sat low on four stubby legs, valved and levered like something from Jules Verne. To the cage's front a plain wooden table; two chairs and a water jar, empty, and I his captor, waiting in a crouch. The smell was of dry rot; of earth and hot masonry; the copper tones of old blood.

‘Have a cigarette,' I offered.

His hand barely shook as he reached for his first. I lit up myself and watched his eyes roam through the room, taking in the workbench with its wrist restraints; the tool cupboards with their straps and pipes and gardening tools; the vats of petroleum that stood piled in one corner. He took me in, too, stripped of my coat now, and my collar open to the second button, though he did not seem to notice the reassuring smile that marked my lips. The cigarette curled between his fingers. He kept scattering the ashes over himself, his drags fast and shallow, not tasting the smoke.

Oh, I know what he was so excited about. He had to be asking himself.
When the hell is he going to start?

He ground out the cigarette, ran a hand over his face, his eyes wandering back towards the proffered pack. I remained where I was, watching him, gauging his soul.

‘Go on, take another.'

He did, too, and another after that, his eyes moist with his question.

I wondered had he ever been tortured before.

When the pack was gone, I made a show of straightening up and stretching out my legs. ‘I'll go upstairs and fetch us some coffee,' I said. ‘How do you take it?' But Pavel hadn't made up his mind yet whether or not he would talk.

Lunchtime, I brought him a portion of turkey breast, stuffing, and a large scoop of potato salad. The tray held two plates, spoons and napkins, and two pieces of lemon tart. Pavel ate cautiously, chewing each bite with extravagant care. Perhaps he feared that I might attempt to poison him. After dessert, I broke open a fresh pack of cigarettes, before exchanging Pavel's dirty plate for a toilet bucket of corrugated iron.

‘You just let me know when, and I can give you some privacy,' I instructed him, but he just stared at me with his wet coal eyes. The bucket had been scrubbed with lye and emanated a pungent stink all its own that, once made conscious, routed the cellar's other smells and crowded our senses. We sat in its stench and traded glances. He waited patiently for me to ask the first question. I fetched my chessboard from the corner cupboard and set to playing a string of solitary games, sending rooks in chase of bishops, and angling for the queen. Hours passed, I switched to draughts.

And still he waited, waited for my question. But I didn't have one ready for him yet.

The wait ate away at him. Must have done, it was only natural, though little enough showed on his face. He watched me all afternoon, trying to make me out: a middle-aged man with nicotine stains in his whiskers. Square, heavy hands made ugly by life. The brow
avuncular, as was the stoop. Clean white shirt, crisp handkerchief, and an eye-patch made of suede. Heavy, winter boots, scuffed from the season. I wonder what I added up to for him. Not much, I wager; I was the Colonel's henchman, a second-order villain, perhaps a little rakish under my patch. His gaze kept returning to my boots. He may have wondered would I use them to break his shins.

He gave in after dinner. The silence must have grown intolerable. ‘Go on,' he told me, shoving his uneaten sandwich back onto his plate. ‘Put on your gloves and get it over with.' His voice, I thought, was remarkably controlled.

I rose and strolled over to his cell, formulating my first question.

‘You are married?' I asked him. ‘I noticed the ring.'

‘So?'

‘So? Is she pretty?'

‘You want to know whether my wife is pretty?'

‘Yes.'

He smiled at that, a bitter little smile, and shook his head. When I left him, an hour later, he was smoking again, and spinning his wedding ring around his emaciated finger.

That's how it was, our first day in the basement: a day of silence, two men puffing away at their cigarettes, and a single, inept question around dinnertime that fell on recalcitrant ears. The truth is that I was hardly as much in control as I may have made it seem, nor as calmly content with my role of silent observer. It had been a day full of surprises. I had risen early that morning and dressed with extravagant care. My apartment was stuffy with the smells of my wash-basket and
troubled digestion. I might have opened a window despite the cold, but the latch was frozen shut and the glass frost-smeared even on the inside. There was no need to make breakfast – I should have my morning coffee at the Colonel's – but as every morning I took the time to iron a fresh collar and handkerchief, having long cherished the belief that one could tell a man's mettle by the crispness of its crease (a foolish notion, no doubt, but one that had proven remarkably stubborn). It was not quite six when I went to pour hot water over my car's windows and hood, and not half six gone when I let myself into the Colonel's villa with my own set of keys. The drive had been uneventful enough, if cold, and punctured at one eerie intersection by the howling of wolves retreating back into the woods after their nightly excursions into the city.

I arrived at the villa and reported for work with my usual gusto, only to have the Colonel wave me away and bid me wait out of earshot. He was on the phone, a terse conversation of barked half-syllables, one jowly cheek still swathed in shaving lather. Later, when he found me sitting idly upon the living-room couch, he ignored the simple present I had prepared for him and instructed me in language more plain than was his custom not to use any form of physical coercion on Pavel until further notice. I was conscious of the absurdity of the request, of course, but did not voice any protest. Midday, when I ventured into the kitchen and saw that the Colonel was missing from the Christmas table with its half-carved turkey and seasonal decorations, his wife advised me that Fosko was receiving a Russian officer in his study, ostensibly for the exchange of gifts. Later still, the Colonel left for town in gala uniform and polished boots: I saw him drive off from the servants' bathroomwindow as I was taking a prolonged toilet break occasioned by my recalcitrant prostate. He had not yet returned when I knocked off from work at half six; his children sat playing under the Christmas tree without the benefit of a paternal presence, their mother thumbing idly through her husband's
record collection. In other words, I had been left, for the entirety of the day, with no real instructions, and a prisoner on my hands whom I was not allowed to touch.

None of this would have made me quite as tongue-tied, being a chatty fellow by disposition, had the Colonel not made it clear that he expected answers out of Pavel Richter nevertheless. When I politely inquired how I was to do this, he merely told me that Pavel was a man ‘all broken up over the loss of a boy. Just ply him with cigarettes, and he will start talking all on his own.' It was not the moment, I felt, to inform Fosko that we had hanged the wrong child.